I hope Franks has a slide presentation for this one.
Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks had a "conversation" with ex-Virginia lieutenant governor candidate E.W. Jackson. As to the most important question—
why?— I don't have a clue. It seems Franks wanted to use the opportunity to show he could be every bit as crazy as the name-brand crackpots on his side of the aisle, and there's no better way to do that then to sit down with E.W. Jackson and nod approvingly
as the man's mind detaches from all reality:
Jackson asked the Arizona congressman about the “profound threat to Christianity in general and to our Christian foundations in this country,” which he said comes from President Obama and the “drumbeat of atheism that attacks everything, ‘get the cross down,’ ‘don’t show a Bible,’ ‘don’t wear a cross,’ ‘don’t say God bless you.’ It just seems like every day we’re hearing some new effort to try to shut Christians up and shut us down.”
The proper response to listening to a man talk about his vivid hallucinations of a conspiracy against him ought to be something like "Are you all right?" or "Is there someone I should call to pick you up after this?" Because Franks is a House Republican, however, he took the preferred House Republican approach to hearing such things, which is to agree wholeheartedly with the ranting nut and, just to show that you are true man of the people, add in your own conspiracy theories as well. Franks obliged with a long theory about how ISIS was the new Nazi Party, how it was in fact an existential threat to all of Christianity across the world, and how the even bigger danger was from the "secular left" in America that will help them destroy America ... somehow.
But as you said and as you said so wisely, it’s always the water on the inside of the ship that sinks it. Our greatest danger to religious freedom, I believe, is within our own country where we’re doing as you said, "take those crosses down." I used to say that the secular left would never quit until they said that we needed to start taking down the stars of David and the crosses of Calvary out of the tombstones out in Arlington National Cemetery. People thought that was an outrageous statement but just in the last two weeks there’s a group now that wants us to do that.
This is false, by the way. Franks seems to have taken it from a conservative chain email hoax, which is how the entire House Republican caucus appears to get their daily news, but this particular one has been
circulating hither and yon over the internets for over a decade now no matter how many debunkings it receives. But we continue.
It’s the water on the inside of the ship that sinks it, God help us to be salt and light while there’s still time because our faith is at risk. And if our faith in this country is destroyed, then I believe that the very foundation of the nation is destroyed and America will be remembered rather than recognized in the present.
How we get from ISIS being the Nazi Party to America being destroyed after the secular left removes crosses from headstones is left to our imagination, because Franks does not choose to explain it. Do all those crosses keep ISIS at bay, as they would vampires? Is the theory that the "secular left" will be eager to impose sharia law because the "secular left" is all about empowering far-right conservative religious movements to dismantle the wall between church and state? Just how do we get from a hoax email to the end of the republic—there seems to be a few steps missing in between?
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Whatever. We'll chalk this one up as yet another sodding House Republican who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality but instead chooses to base his worldview, and his governing, on whatever paranoias have wafted into his head or his mailbox. How many does this make? Fifty? A hundred and fifty? All of them?